To cap the nation’s first “national re-entry week,” President Obama issued a memo Friday to all agencies about the importance of helping former prisoners.
“America is a nation of second chance,” Obama wrote in the memo. “Promoting the rehabilitation and reintegration of individuals who have paid their debt to society makes communities safer by reducing recidivism and victimization; assists those who return from prison, jail, or juvenile justice facilities to become productive citizens; and saves taxpayer dollars by lowering the direct and collateral costs of incarceration,” he stated.
The Obama administration used this week to promote his late-term priority of overhauling the nation’s sentencing laws, among other things. The administration rolled out a series of initiatives aimed at making it easier for former prisoners and juvenile offenders to reintegrate into society, including granting them more access to healthcare.
Obama outlined some of the barriers people face upon release from prison or jail and encouraged society to ease their transition.
Obama’s recommendations for doing so include “banning the box,” which makes it illegal for employers to ask an applicant’s criminal history background in the early stage of job-seeking, restoring voting rights to released felons and reducing minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders.
“This lack of opportunity decreases public safety, increases costs to society and tears at the fabric of our nation’s communities,” Obama wrote in the memo.
The memo officially establishes the existing federal re-entry council led by Attorney General Loretta Lynch and outlines its membership and duties. It also requires the interagency task force to develop within 100 days a plan for how the federal government can ease the transition of former prisoners back into society; reduce the prison population; improve the nation’s criminal databases’ accuracy; and make it easier for ex-cons to get jobs.
The memo, which Lynch will publish in the Federal Register, also grants the council an executive directorship and requires it to convene at least once annually.
